Is there a Doctor in the house?
Introducing the BD Health Check Service
Our new BD Health Check Service is helping clients to improve the efficiency, resilience and success of their Business Development (BD) approach. It uses a simple, proven Best Practice Framework to quickly and effectively identify where and how BD activities can be improved.
What does the mean in practice?
Let me explain, by stretching the medical metaphor to its limits.
The hospital
At 50 Degrees we’re probably best known for our bid writing expertise (more than £1.5bn secured for clients in last 12 months, if you’re asking 😉). But bid writing doesn’t take place in a vacuum; it’s underpinned by our wealth of senior experience, delivering activities across the entire BD Cycle. Speaking of which… here it is:
We work with a range of clients on a daily basis, from local SMEs and VCSEs to global organisations. We support some of the world’s largest companies, routinely helping them to identify, bid for, win, and deliver contract opportunities aligned to their business objectives. This reflects our recent growth as a company, delivering commercial modelling and review support, expanding our solution design services, and helping organisations to analyse the markets they operate in to identifying opportunities for them.
The symptoms
This broad range of expertise and experience gives us a pretty good understanding of the key challenges our clients face when it comes to winning work. From public sector clients navigating the ever-evolving world of procurement legislation; through busy bid teams finding the right balance of delivering enough bids vs making them really resonate; to maximising efficiency… all while learning from mistakes and improving the quality of the process.
Sounds exhausting, right?
But it doesn’t have to be! Informed by 50 Degrees’ 14-years experience of providing end-to-end BD support, we’ve developed a simple process for identifying where and how your BD approach can be improved.
The cure? The BD Health Check (obvs)
We’ll deliver a detailed assessment of each stage of your BD Cycle, reviewing and assessing your capacity to deliver critical activity, including:
Corporate growth and sales strategy: does it reflect your strengths and weaknesses, the state of the markets you work in, does it focus on sustainable growth?
Capture and qualification processes: do you have simple, effective processes that support you to identify the right opportunities and lay a foundation for successful bidding?
Quality and commercial elements: are you focused on quality, do you have robust processes supporting commercial submissions that provide the best chance of success, while protecting your business from associated risk?
Contract handover, mobilisation and lessons learned: do you have an integrated knowledge transfer process that ensures operational teams understand the solution?
Following the review, we’ll produce an accurate, scored assessment of the quality of your existing approaches. In the areas where there’s room for improvement, we’ll give you access to our Best Practice tools and processes (you’ll forgive us for not going into detail here!!). We’ll also provide you with access to tailored advice from our team of BD experts. It’s a practical, personal approach that delivers sustainable results.
But you don’t need to take our word for it. Here’s what one of our clients has to say…
“50D has improved our bid process and commercial modelling beyond recognition. Whilst we knew the key activities required for a good process, the team at 50D helped us bring these together into a cohesive process and set of tools that the whole team could work with. We were given clear process, guidance, and hands on assistance to improve our full end to end process.” Brian Mahon. Managing Director. Moore Insight.
So, if your BD activities are feeling a bit under the weather, if your teams and success rates are feeling the pressure from the wild economic climate we find ourselves in, maybe it’s time for a quick Health Check? We promise it won’t hurt!
Dan Hill
Managing Consultant